More military couples balance raising children, warfare

EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. - Four-year-old Ava abandons her playmates at school, flying into the arms of Air Force Sgt. Stacia Zachary. The mother and daughter head to the playground.

Their afternoon routine will change in August, when Zachary deploys to Afghanistan for six months and her husband, Air Force Sgt. Christopher Zachary, tackles the solo parenting duties for Ava and her 13-year-old stepbrother. Then in December, dad will deploy and the kids will go to Idaho and stay with an aunt until mom returns.

Growing numbers of American servicemen and women are married to each other - up 35 percent from 2000 to 2007 - and eight years of war that have stretched the military's resources mean deployments for both spouses can come in rapid-fire succession.

Many of those couples have children, although the Pentagon does not track that number. For the kids, it means rarely having both parents at home simultaneously. When both are gone, or when duties keep the home partner too busy, extended families often come into play. Kids head to grandparents, aunts or other relatives, sometimes across the country.

It's a unique sacrifice military families make to combine having a normal life with a state of drawn-out war. It has its own stresses and rewards, couples say.

For the parents, it can put added strain on marriages as they spend months apart and worry, like the kids, about a loved one on the battlefield.

"We've been married seven years, but we figured that we've spent only two and half of those together," says Christopher Zachary, who serves in the Air Force.

But dual military marriages can also foster closer ties with extended family, and help sustain a solid marriage because fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines better understand the demands and culture of military life than civilian spouses, couples say.

The Zacharys were among 128,347 active-duty and reserve members of the military married to other service members in 2007, the latest year for which Department of Defense statistics are available. That was a 35 percent increase since 2000, when there were 95,336 dual military couples. It does not, however, track the number of children dual military couples have.